The Trials of British Psephology

The 2015 UK Election wasn’t just a nightmare for the Liberal Democrats and Labour, it was also a disaster for British psephologists. In the closing weeks of the election, all the major pollsters repeatedly predicted a hung parliament, with the Tories and Labour netting approximately the same number of seats. In the wake of Conservatives’ stunning victory, pollsters have been defending their methods and trying to determine how they got the election outcome so wrong.

My initial reaction to the pollsters was sympathetic. 2015 was an unusual year: There were more parties than ever with a credible shot of winning seats, the rise of Scottish nationalism was a novel and powerful force, and the number of homes still using ye olde telephone landline was at an unprecedented low. But then I found the video below, showing that in a much simpler election landscape the pollsters muffed the catch in eerily similar fashion in 1992, again failing to predict the Conservative majority that the voters delivered.

We had flagged that we were conducting this poll to the Daily Mirror as something we might share as an interesting check on our online vs our telephone methodology, but the results seemed so “out of line” with all the polling conducted by ourselves and our peers – what poll commentators would term an “outlier” – that I “chickened out” of publishing the figures – something I’m sure I’ll always regret.